african american teenagers

From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. "Boys just being boys" turns out to be true only when those boys are white. The story that I think will be my life starts today. Suddenly, at just sixteen years old, Amal's bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words, his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it' With spellbinding lyricism, award-winning author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth, in a system designed to strip him of both.

"Follows the experiences of two African-American teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida"--OCLC.

"When Chloe's mom forbids her to apply for a spot at the dance conservatory of her dreams, she devises a secret plan to drive two hundred miles from Philadelphia to New York, the nearest audition. When annoying neighbor Eli insists upon hitching a ride, he threatens to tell Chloe's mom if she leaves without him and his smelly dog, Geezer. Now Chloe's chasing her ballet dreams down the east coast, with two unwanted (but kinda cute) passengers in her car, butterflies in her stomach, and a really dope playlist on repeat"--OCLC.

A guide for encouraging adolescent African-American males to write.

When DJ ParSec (Paris Secord), rising star of the local music scene, is found dead over her turntables, the two girls who found her, Kya (her pre-fame best friend) and Fuse (her current chief groupie) are torn between grief for Paris and hatred for each other--but when the lack of obvious suspects stalls the investigation, and the police seem to lose interest, despite pressure from social media and ParSec's loyal fans, the two girls unite, determined to find out who murdered their friend.

Zsa-Zsa, a confident and independent seventeen-year-old girl, stays with her boyfriend Ameen even though he sometimes takes his anger out on her, but when her first love Malachi comes back into her life, Zsa-Zsa does not know what to do.

Fifteen-year-old Angela Jenkins accepts Shayla Mercer's offer to make sure Angela wins the holiday fashion show competition, but she soon learns that the price of instant popularity can be very high.

A collection of coming-of-age short stories that reflect on the African American teenage experience in America.

In the 1960s, Elwood is college-bound until he makes a mistake that lands him at a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose staff profess to shape inmates into upstanding young men but who routinely deliver vicious beatings and sexual abuse and make sure resisters disappear forever. The shocked Elwood takes Martin Luther King's pacifist approach to events, but friend Turner has other ideas. Whitehead researched the Florida Industrial School for Boys (later the Dozier Academy), where a secret mass grave was found after its 2011 closure.

"Follows the experiences of two African-American teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida"--OCLC.